of a mutinying, multitudinous self, then I'm lost.
But let a semi loaded with bridge girders come barreling
down on me, I'm in a nanosecond propelled
into the singular, fleet and unequivocal as a deer's thought
As to the relevance of poetry in our time, I delay and listen
to the distances: John Fahey's "West Coast Blues," a truck
backing up, hammers, crows in their perennial discussion of moles.
My rage began at forty. The unstirred person, the third-person
void, the you of accusations and reprisals, visited me.
Many nights we sang together; you don't even exist.
In print, a little later is the closest we come to now: the turn
in the line ahead and behind; the voice, slower than the brain;
and the brain, slower than the black chanterelle.
The first time I left the South I thought I sighted
in an Indiana truckstop both Anne Sexton
and John Frederick Nims, but poetry makes a little dent like a dart.
It's the solo most hold inside the breath as indigestible truth.
For backup singers, there's the mumbling of the absolutes.
Du-bop of rain and kinking heat La-la of oblivion.
Sheep-bleat and stone-shift and pack-choir.
There is a sense beyond words that runs through them:
animal evidence like fur in a fence, especially valuable now,
self-visited as we are, self-celebrated, self-ameliorated,
and self-sustained, with the very kit of our inner weathers,
with migraine, our pain du jour, our bread of suffering.
If poetry is no good to you, why pretend it can enlighten you?
Why trouble the things you have heard or seen written
when you can look at the madrone tree?
BUFUS
We have founded a new kind of frog:
three-legged, one-eyed; or one-legged with three
eyes. Hops backward. Spongiform
tentacles creep its spine. Odd
to describe, like tubing around the heart,
an off la in the elemental rag.
Is Earth already whacked? How
address a prayer: "God Junior"? "Ms. God"?
The iron heats, the waffles pop.
But grace stings the meat. What a strange
duffel Brother Esophagus unpacks.
Taste quick. It's sewage down a pipe.
Void once meant filth. Frogs hopped
what grew from it. Now the jig's up.
Elimination spawns a myth.
Frogs lollygag under a rainbow
scrim of antifreeze and PCPs
or leap to prophets in songs.
Cinema sci-fi loves anthro-frogs,
orange planets of tight clothing
where cyber-sleuths glibly concoct
the quantum physics of a hop.
Ideal frogs are rainforest cancer cures.
The default frog's a caricature.
The default human's real, but how
weird to live in a body: looking out
but always staying in, not
knowing what's there and not,
and all the while beating against
the limits of perception like a moth.
I'm happiest, frog-like, in a tub,
ballooning a wash of ticklish bubbles.
Money swallows men and excretes cartoons.
Make everything simple. Water's
the central dodge. Everything
shed comes back as drinking water.
FAMILY MATTRESS
It's in a permanent slump now, dry-docked
in the attic, an old, dream-battered raft,
striped as a convict, but how high it lay
mornings when I stole in to drift
down the resilient ether of its cloud
as though a schooner broke from the clods
of a field I had been hoeing, or I found,
among promises never delivered,
the risible helium of the soul
that woke in sudden divings and spinnings.
Here, too, my grandparents fell back swooning,
white-shouldered in the mercy of wings,
after conceiving my father and aunt.
To heft it now and wear it through the door
is to feel the weight of their weighdessness.
A coop smell rises. I am draped in myth
and the dried tallows and yeasts of tradition,
but set it on the floor. They will not mind,
who taught me music and setting hooks,
when I rip back the ticking to feather jigs.
CHANNEL
for Jon Tribble
It had come up from the night depth of the lake to bend and chatter
the rod as it lunged
under the boat, and now it flopped in the net until I had it in a
slippery scrimmage on the aluminum floor:
suave as a satyr's haunch, but appaloosaed with dots, treble-spined,
and whiskered like Confucius.
And now as I pliered open the jaws, and took the hook it had taken,
it made something like a bee-buzz.
From deep in its mouth that was white as a ping-pong ball, it made
something like absolution;'
and then it curled in the icebox, whacking the beers with its tail;
and still, there it was.
I do not like to hurt a thing alive, even a catfish, so slow to perish not
even Saint Thomas Aquinas
or W. C. Fields could raise the eloquence to free its killer of guilt.
In Florida, catfish walk.
Nailed to an oak, skin peeled like wallpaper, catfish won't stop talking
with twitches.
But what they say improves on guilt. You have to have waited many
nights, with your face
blackening from the smoke of burning tires, and shined your light on
a belled rod ringing
over stones and going fast into the river, to know that their lives mean
as much as your life.
And what is your life? The bottom of a shallow place? Magnificences?
You hold them
carefully.You listen, and they say your name in ancient Catfish.
HOMAGE TO MISSISSIPPI JOHN HURT
This morning when I went to play the scales
the strings of the guitar were so cold they might
have slept all night in the Holston's South Fork.
And the week after I bought it, while it traveled
between Herman Wallecki & Sons of Los Angeles
and southern Illinois, I dreamed
of a guitar so old it had weathered gray as a barn.
It had two necks, and when I touched
the bottom one to grab a C, the neck broke off
in my hands and wasps flew from the sound chamber.
But the tone of the strings on the other neck
was yours, old sweet-playing father.
In the late twenties, they cut a few minutes
of you into vinyl and sent you back to pick
and sing for nearly forty years in church and at parties
and to get by as a hired hand, practicing fatherhood.
Greatest of the fingerpickers, lost in dark mud,
two folkies found you in the singing vinyl
and asked, "How do you do that with a guitar?"
and searched maps of Mississippi for the town
Avalon from one of your songs, and could not find it
after all that time, so it seemed you were never there.
And what was there? Kudzu, polio, celestial darkness?
My band played Bumgilly, Nowhere, the cattle
auction, the armory in Wedowee, and our biggest gig:
the annual Fourth of July bash at the asylum.
But music has no place. "Mississippi has two
cities,"
said Faulkner, "Memphis and New Orleans."
Upriver, the Vienna of the Delta is Clarksdale.
We looked for easy sevenths and found a covered
wagon drawn by eight mules, a beautiful dwarf
who leapt a rail to gulp down a crushed-out cigarette.
In the New York Public Library, on a nineteenth-century surveyor's
plat,
the two folkies found Avalon,
drove to Mississippi, and asked at a general store,
"Have you heard of a musician named John Hurt?"
"Third road, turn right, house on your left, up on a hill."
So they found him on a porch and took him north
to become briefly, cogently famous and leave songs—
"Loins Collins," "Candy Man," "Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor,"
"Casey Jones," "Creole Belle"—
and return to Mississippi and die.
He was a little man, but cathedrals lit up in his hands.
guitar?"
He darted and slurred, a syncopation, a waltz evolving to jig.
By slowing the record down and listening, a phrase
at a time, repeatedly, for six weeks, I learned
to scratch out a barely detectable rendition of "Funky Butt."
I do not like to sing, but sing, driving home from work,
sing to heal the language of its long service as a tool.
Greatest of the fingerpickers, lost in dark mud,
I do not know about the god of the fathers,
but to be born again in the tink and clong of a guitar
is better than to rot in a symphony of heavenly accountants
plucking the varicose vein of elderly harps. I know
a small man's largeness can be a pistol
in the dark, but it can also play. The name of joy is music.
THE MASTERS
from "Five Walks in the Nineteenth Century"
When I began someone had already described
all the thoughts that might be suggested
by roots, what it is to go alone cold in twilight
down a country road past a cemetery,
all the ideas that were like leaves and boles,
all the dreams men had in factories,
and all the metaphors of mirrors and shadows.
Someone had used up all the women
with one arm and all the men with one eye,
and everything in the dump had been put
on paper and thrown into the dump
under other papers covered with the same words:
all the ways of smiling and drying one's hair;
all the unconscious, subliminal gestures
of pawnbrokers, short-order cooks, and stutterers
had been registered in the hallmark of sighs
and the museum of frowns; all the public
victories in private ruins had been ordained
in the scholarly journals and little magazines.
Both the plowed field and the barn
bursting with alfalfa had been set against
the works of Duke Ellington and Guglielmo
Marconi. No pixel of the ideal page
was not black with the traffic
of iambs, spondees, and double dactyls.
All the ways a tree might be said to speak
to a woman grieving the death of a child
had been claimed, purloined, reclaimed,
and readapted for pianos and violins.
All the words that had come into the language
in the last five years and all the styles
of exploiting one's knowledge of Latin.
Brake fluid, I thought, perhaps brake fluid,
but it was the age of tack and guy wires.
I would have to write a good pine tree
before I could walk the page recklessly,
missing the masters, but bolstered
by their absence, in it for the long haul
as if no poem had been made yet,
as if the poetry did not matter at all.
MOSES
Moses is massive, as Michelangelo sculpted him for the tomb of Pope
Julius II,
looking off to the side in outward vigilance while inwardly descending:
the face of a judge with the body of a mechanic or teamster; a fine
delicacy of veins,
a muscular trauma in the stone, he seems to hide in revelation and
exalt while suffering.
Clinton is six-three; Bush Senior was a little shorter, unless Clinton
stood in platform shoes
while they debated. Dukakis lost to Senior, not because of Willie
Horton but because
he was five-eight and, in the lethal advertisement, helmeted, waving
giddily from the tank,
he resembled a peripatetic spud, as though the divine seamstress had
run out of material
and attached the body of a presumptuous child to the brain of a
grown man. A mistake. Though
only blemish suggests God to the cynic—a botch, a humanizing crack
in the stone.
There must be terror. And Moses was tongue-tied. His brother spoke
for him. So the law
opened, veiled in mystique, graven of a grave height and distance, and
I am convinced, there is a secret wisdom, a fiction they must never
know is fiction.
That Moses was himself Sinai: that is Michelangelo's secret
The image accomplishes
more. It bares the loneliness of a man who has seen God.
Mastery speaks for the design of politics, but politics is not art.
Not usually.
Politics is like justice: blind, but less helpful, more forgiving. Art is
mercilessly simple:
implicit everywhere one thing looks something like another, but
more explicitly,
the thing itself, relieved by knowledgeable infusion, crafted, and
distressed to beauty.
In Rome, you can see it now, in the basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli,
one of the few stones touched and improved by the human hand.
TEN SIGHS FROM A SABBATICAL
1
Let loose. Lists into ashes. Tasks into stones.
In lethargy I revise myself. I loiter in the lily's canal.
Time to mood-walk among obsolete resolutions.
To drain rhetoric to all that does not speak and cannot listen.
Hello, thisde. What do horses hear?
A nap cleans me like a tooth. Mere duty rocks the hours.
The brain's self-whispering brushes the conscious event.
The face of a good friend is a breast.
A call comes in on the switchboard of the birds.
I swivel and skitter, a potato thrown through a warehouse.
I am injected with dream questions.
Instruct me, heavenly recipe for the worms.
How long must I be buried before I am done?
Rub me right, rule me, sweet other.
I'm old wood and new string.
I can only be an animal through this violin.
2
Who speaks now as if subject and predicate decree the world?
The trees were locked up, but have broken out.
I trail off down the sidewalk of an afterthought.
Only a busted cycle, Lord, a gleam spirited to rust.
What litters of darkness televisions own.
I'm a punched ticket swaddled by lint.
Come, eavesdroppers, hear the foreplay of obsessions.
A tsk-tsking, with a dumpty-do for variation.
Who else sits here, blues-measled, lonesome afternoons,
looking up follicle and Warren G. Harding
&
nbsp; in Compton's Illustrated Encyclopedia?
Are you better than once, lightest foreshadowing?
Are you the largest amygdala in homeroom?
3
Pilgrim, what good there is for you to see
finds you. You don't have to look for it
A lily trembles by a spring-fed brook
Live children dream. A tax accountant
does a glum impression of Charlie Chan.
I'm off this year, dally to your dilly, yang
to your yin, but let me visit the office
once, friends open their mouths
to show the scars of humorectomies.
Why? Who's not wronged? Go cut a switch,
my own sweet mama used to say, and me,
I'd bring back a reed while my smarter
sister would present a gnarl of thorns.
But there's a glitch in utter victimhood.
The wronged-by-men-and-women face down
the wronged-by-God. Walk fast or run.
All verse writers moan, Too late, and zoom!
We're poster children for the irony telethon.
4
But oh to have come up with something new:
a minor amendment to a hairdo,
a twitch in a phrase, or chevron on shirt.
The will of others must be sidestepped after all.
If one is to reach into the pocket and bring up
like a magician's rabbit the gold eggs of the future,
one needs a tongue ring, earring, or mustache,
though in the case of bards, what dumb malaise
and spiritual laryngitis leave may be only